Abstract
There are many different strains of malaria parasites, each represented by a unique sequence of amino acids. A desirable vaccine would match the amino acid sequence of the parasite antigen. Because of the three-dimensional structure of protein, not all sites in the amino acid sequence participate in the binding between the vaccine-induced antibody and the parasite antigen. Nor do all sites have equal importance. In this work, we apply a nonnegative lasso-based variable selection to identify the 'important' amino acid sites and evaluate their relative importance. We then define a metric, the functional coverage, to measure the 'effective' matching in the amino acid sequence between the vaccine and the parasite. With the variable selection procedure, development of a vaccine needs only to target the important sites, and the potential effectiveness of a vaccine candidate is reflected by the functional coverage. Published 2015. This article is a U.S. Government work and is in the public domain in the USA.